Casualties of War:
Women and children are both a direct and indirect casualty of war. One of my roles during this deployment has been to care for the children who have been injured as well as care for those who have come to our gates seeking help where many Iraqi’s consider the only place in their country where their children can be helped.
There are many reasons why children are injured. The most common reason children come to us is from IED blasts or mortar attacks. The terrorists have increasingly targeted civilians in places where many children can be found. The next way children are injured is by bullets or bombs intended for the terrorists. To avoid being captured the terrorists often set up there mini bases in apartment complexes, schools, or mosques. They will then fire rockets or other weapons at soldiers who are passing by, the soldiers will return fire with either: machine guns, rockets, or missiles. Unfortunately, when the terrorist use women and children as their human shields then there will be times when the innocent will be harmed or killed inadvertently. The coalition forces have done everything possible to avoid harming civilians even causing an increase in risk to all of the ground troops. This is what separated us from the barbarous acts of the terrorist. No American soldier would ever think of hiding behind a woman or child, the terrorists due this commonly.
Taking care of the children has been both a blessing and a hardship. I love to be able to help the innocents recover; however, seeing the daily carnage involving children has taken its emotional toll on me. There are a number of children who stand out in my memory. One such young lady was an 11 y/o. She came to us with a badly fractured thigh bone. She had been shot in the leg and required extensive surgery and will need more in the future to replace a 4 inch segment of bone that is now missing. She had a face that could brighten the entire ICU. As she woke from anesthesia and began to recover her face became even more radiant with an unexplainable joy. She enjoyed playing and coloring with the staff and the war weary staff would gravitate to her. It was only later as we were trying to find out about living family members that the other side of the story came out. She had been shot by the Americans. She went on to describe how she was riding in the back of her car. Her father and mother were in the front of the car. They were at a checkpoint and then all of a sudden gun fire started and the next thing she knew was the pain of having been shot. Her mother and father lay dead in the front seat. The exact interaction is not clear but rockets and IEDs were found in the back of their car and then bullets starting flying. A man came to visit her after about a week. He said he was a relative but she stated that she did not know him. The agents in charge of such visits became suspicious and followed the man and he was also found to be an insurgent and was arrested. When we heard the story we were amazed at her countenance considering she was being cared for by the exact same military that had killed her parents. I hope it was because she could sense she was being lovingly cared for. This is the nice story, there are many others where the children have had horrible brain injuries from which they will never recover.
It is a couple of weeks before I am scheduled to leave. I have become desensitized to brutally injured children. My eyes have dried. My heart lacks the ache these children used to cause. When I have lost the moral outrage over the “Children of War” it is time for a break to regain my perspective.
Solis Deo Gloria
One final thought to come
Duke
